Meditating Into 2012

...sitting quietly on an old striped cushion I’ve found...Coltrane playing Greensleeves softly on the mp3 player, mixing suddenly with sounds of fireworks....I remain sitting a few minutes more...

...upstairs in mom’s house, where I’m spending the weekend, the house where I grew up, home to memories and dust motes that never fail to make me sneeze...last night mom told me about rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn during the Hoover administration...she met Eleanor Roosevelt and Bette Davis, voted against Joe McCarthy, and said she was going to bed as soon as 2012 hit...

...2011 might be called my year of lots of yoga and not a hell of a lot else...yoga teacher training and, eventually, just a little bit of actual teaching, then more training, and a bit more teaching...and even more practicing...earlier this evening drove downtown for my last class of the year, two hours with the legendary Simon Park and a live DJ...mat so drenched with sweat halfway through I could barely move without slipping, but that was okay...felt like I died and came back more than once, and that was good, too...

...2012’s first sunrise yet to come and I’m seeing a lot of daunting challenges, probably some of the biggest I've faced in life, straight ahead...(and I'm not talking about Mayan prophecies)...walls to walk through, waves to ride....endless opportunities to breath, relax, feel, watch, allow...and repeat...

The More Un-Yogic, the Better?

What is here is elsewhere; what is not here is nowhere.
Vishva-Sara-Tantra

Folks, you know I’ve never been a fan of yoga. If I wanted to spend all day on the ground sweating in a contorted position, I would eat another gas station hot dog.
Stephen Colbert

...sometimes I arrive at yoga class in what might not be considered the most, y’know, yogic mood...at some strange juncture in a difficult day, full of anxiety, anger, and/or general misery, exacerbated by the trip to yoga class, driving through traffic in the rain or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike...or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike in the rain, the guy who nearly killed me though I had the right of way having the nerve to yell at me...you get the idea...leaving me tromping in and rolling out my mat in a an utterly wired and generally negative frenzy....really, there couldn't be a better time to practice yoga...

...making me especially grateful for these kind, calm, and centered teachers who help me to let go...

...though, of course, as I’m learning, now, it’s a bit more complicated...or maybe simpler, but more difficult...if, ultimately, more rewarding for that...when I am the yoga teacher...

Creative Enough?

If the roof doesn't leak, the architect hasn't been creative enough.
Frank Lloyd Wright

...heard a song in a dream, with a chorus that kept playing in my head as I awoke, a particularly nasal Bob Dylan-like voice singing...

you’re an interesting victim but you’re
in this way

...I have no idea what this means...

...sometimes feel like a drug addict without the drugs....a writer who goes days without doing any actual writing...a yogi who sees the sun go up and then down while failing to move beyond the I should stage toward actually practicing any yoga....the old crap, resolutely failing to crumble to dust and blow away under the light of awareness, lingers on...but so do I...

...one time overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two men in suits, one of them passionately extolling his credentials as the kind of original thinker any employer would die for, announcing to anyone within earshot...which, in this case, had to include dishwashers and maybe even people in the parking lot...I think outside the box!!!...to which the other responded, consolingly, I know you do....I could sympathize, but had to wonder if someone who'd use such a hackneyed cliché as thinking outside the box actually did...

What’s the one small step you can take to change an unhelpful pattern? If the answer is ‘Nothing,’ you’re not being creative enough.
Ana Forrest, Fierce Medicine*


* cool book...see my review here

Practice Makes...Practice (Running Into the Mirror, Part Three)

It’s been so long since I felt at home
in the mirror...
Jorma Kaukonen

...they say...or at least some of them do...that we call it yoga practice...no matter how much we do of it and for how long, no matter what our level of proficiency...because it’s practice for the rest of life...which might sound cheesy, but it’s also probably true, and valuable...(sometimes that’s the case with cheesy shit)...(but not often)...(this is still Yoga for Cynics for chrissake, not Yoga for People Who Get Their Feel-Good Philosophies of Life From Washed Up Sitcom Stars Turned Motivational Speakers, or something)...

...that includes, of course, the sustaining-the-challenging-pose thing...or the as-far-as-you-can-get-into-the-challenging-pose thing...with poise and aplomb...as well as that continuing-to-work-on-that-challenging-pose-without-concern-for-the-fruits-of-your-actions thing...(also known as, y’know, that-whole-Bhagavad-Gita thing)...

...but also, and perhaps most challenging...the trying-to-feel-good-about-the-fact-that-the-person-on-the-next-mat-who’s-never-been-to-one-damn-yoga-class-before-can-do-a-perfect-bird-of-paradise-pose-(svarga dvidasana...though, judging by my recent Google search, there's some dispute about that)-with-no-apparent-effort-while-you-can-barely-get-your-“peace fingers”-around-your-big-toe thing...as well as its opposite and corollary, the trying-not-to-feel-the-slightest-bit-smug-toward-that-ultra-spiritual-person-on-the-next-mat-who-can’t-come-close-to-doing-gomukhasana-arms-despite-having-practiced-for-years-longer-than-you-have thing....the both of which might be summed up as the acknowledging-that-you're-totally-competitive-about-yoga-on-the-inside-even-though-you're-totally-against-the-very-concept-of-competitive-yoga-on-the-outside thing...

...and, needless to say, egolessness and awareness are even harder to sustain...or achieve in the first place...off the mat...but, then, at least part of that problem is that the taking-yoga-off-the-mat thing is part of a two-way dialogue...in which we, often as not, bring non-yoga onto the mat...so that what we take off the mat ends up being closely related to what we brought onto it in the first place...

...and that, of course, is why we gotta keep practicing...

Difficult Yoga/Difficult Yogis (Building From the Ground Up, Part Two)

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
Donald Barthelme

...my 84 year old mom and I have our own little yoga ritual...goes kinda like this:


Mom: I’m so stiff!

me: Y’know what’d really help with that, mom?

Mom [anticipating, correctly, that I’m gonna say yoga]: Shut up.


...then, such an attitude isn't exactly unique within my family...I'm one of a long line of difficult people...and, while there are lots of reasons I practice yoga, because family members pestered me to is quite certainly not one of them....so, as it's turned out...call it karma or the luck of the draw, as you will...somehow, at some point, I went from too difficult to practice yoga to becoming a difficult yogi...

Whatever it is you are craving at the moment, to be driven by such impulses means that, on a deep level, you don’t believe that you are whole as you are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...ultimately, if all ya can do is have arguments in your head no matter how many asanas and attempts at meditative states, what can ya do but have arguments in your head?....it used to be when I was in a crappy mood in yoga class I felt like that was a problem...since, y’know, all these serious yoga types were so mellow and peaceful, filling up with bliss like wealthy SUV owners at the gas pump...halfway between yoga studio and astral plane...positive energy bouncing off 'em like beads of slobber from a Saint Bernard’s gooey lips...even if none of it landed on me....now, however, having become somewhat of a serious yoga type myself, instead of becoming like them, I’ve realized they’re not so different from myself...and if I’m feeling crappy practicing yoga, then I can practice practicing yoga feeling crappy...